Of course, nothing good came out of it. And we had no right to take it.
But what did we know in the early 1800s? We really didn’t have a category for people who were not like us who were predominately European. Indians and Africans were human but we did not consider them quite in the same category as ourselves.
The Oklahoma territory was almost a barren waste compared to the hills, mountains, rivers, creeks and forests the Cherokee were accustomed. If you’re used to living one way, putting you somewhere very different makes survival near impossible, They could have at least given them the Ozarks. They still aren’t the deep Appalachians.
If I were catty, I’d say, that’s why the Democrat party was formed. They were the ones who wanted the Native Americans expelled from their native lands.
We had no foresight for this as a young nation, but with so little of the country developed even now, and with such massive State and National Park reserves engulfing entire counties, and with so few Native Americans on reservations, we can now see that certain areas could have been left alone by us, for the natives to live as they always had. and we’d still have been the ones with leverage, who could still benefit. What would have been wrong if three counties in eastern Tennessee and three in western North Carolina could have been the Cherokee nation? Would it affect the rest of the nation today? I think not. Most Indians lived in areas that are more or less remote or wilderness today. We could have kept huge expanses as Indian territory in my opinion. and still had much of the individual space and private properties we have today.